The Sixth School Ch. 035

Greg felt it before he even saw it. Gritting his teeth, he turned down to find his dick tenting up his pants. His time in the infirmary had made it clear that his dick had a mind of its own. If Greg wasn't careful to control his state of mind, the thing would grow harder than a titanium rod and refuse to go down for an inordinately long period of time. Greg had been ogling the healer while they moved through the hallway. At the time, he'd been conscious of his own arousal and doing all he could to keep from getting a boner. As soon as he was distracted by the healer walking through the wall, however, he had forgotten about reining in his desires and focused on the new discovery. In any other normal person, being distracted by something is a good way to lose their arousal. To his dick, however, this was the perfect chance to grow harder than a missile.

Feeling his face grow hot, Greg turned to the side so that his erection wasn't as obvious. Olivia, of course, seemed perfectly content to add fuel to the fire. "No need to be ashamed master, it's nothing she hasn't seen before. She even played with it, remember?" She posed.

"Quiet, Olivia!" Greg said, doing his best not to let his voice show just how flustered he was. While the healer hadn't looked back in his direction and was acting like she hadn't heard a thing, Greg could tell by the way her fingers had faltered slightly as she weaved a spell that she had heard the familiar's words.

Regardless, the healer was able to weave her spell to completion, The air around the healer shimmered, and Greg watched as what he could only call a grooming spell engulfed the healer. Everything that had been off about her was fixed within seconds even as she stood in the shimmering air. Her hair all moved back behind her ears and flowed straight down to the small of her back as if someone had taken the time to carefully comb it out. Greg didn't know much about women's hair products back on Earth. He, however, hadn't seen any that left one's hair looking as lustrous as the spell cast by the healer. The bags disappeared from her eyes, The few creases in her clothes, some that Greg hadn't even noticed until then, were all straightened out such that the woman was looking perfectly polished.

"I can help you with your problem too, master." Greg, who had been looking at the healer all this time, hadn't noticed Olivia creeping up on him. Greg could feel chills course through his body when the familiar whispered the words in his ear in a sultry tone. Her warm hands were snaking around his waist reaching for his bulge.

"N...no," Greg declined, unable to keep his voice from sounding halfhearted. "It'll go down on its own," he said shimmying out of his familiar's clutches. From the smile on Olivia's face, it was clear that she was just teasing him, and from the gleam in her eyes, Greg could tell that she planned to continue. To get out ahead of it he nodded towards the healer. "She wishes to talk to you!" He said.

The healer looked between the two of them with a note of curiosity in her eyes. What she was thinking Greg couldn't tell. The healer, however, didn't let her gaze linger too long. Her expression became serious as she turned to Olivia. "I need your thoughts on this," the healer said indicating the sigil on the floor before them.

The familiar's expression also lost the mischievous demeanor as she turned to look at the sigil. Greg looked to Olivia hoping that in watching her assess the sigil, he might get a clue as to how one went about it. Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple. After a minute of watching his familiar, all Greg picked up on was the change in emotions reflected in Olivia's expressions. At first, she was just casually regarding the sigil, then there was a slight pause, after which the familiar's expression became serious. Soon thereafter, there was surprise in her eyes. And going by the way her eyes kept growing wider, her gaze moving back and forth across the sigil even faster, it was clear that the surprise was quickly turning to shock. A few minutes later when Olivia looked back up at the healer, Greg could see the genuine respect in her eyes. Whatever this sigil was, it had clearly made an impression on the familiar and raised her estimation of the healer in her eyes.

"It would seem I severely underestimated you," She said.

"You wouldn't be the first person to," Came the calm reply. Despite the hint of a smile on the healer's lips, Greg heard the dark undertone hidden in the statement.

"What is it?" Greg asked looking between the two.

"An idea that could very well lead to the next era in magic," Olivia answered him.

Greg's eyes went wide. Over the past few weeks of having her in his head and always conversing with her, Greg had learned to distinguish Olivia's different tones. There was a tone the familiar used when she was teasing, and joking around, there was one she used when she was trying to pass on some knowledge or wisdom to him, and there was a final one that she used when she was dealing with really serious subjects. When she used the second voice, she was usually giving him advice that he could either heed or ignore based on what he wanted. The final voice, however, was only used for things that Greg had to pay attention to otherwise he'd be in serious danger or suffer a great loss. This last voice was the one with which the familiar had answered.

"Your familiar exaggerates," Came the calm words from the healer. "What I have here is an idea in its infancy. I don't even know if it'll work, even worse, I don't even know what it working would look like," She relayed. Both by her expression and manner of speech, Greg could tell that the healer took her work very seriously. That Olivia's high praise didn't move her demonstrated just how objective and impartial she strove to be in her analysis of herself.

"What does it do?" Greg asked, still not sure why the three-meter sigil before him could mean the dawn of a new era in magic.

"Has your familiar told you what injuries I suffer from?" The healer asked, her gaze fixed on the sigil before them.

Shaking his head, Greg answered. "No."

"In an ambush ten years ago, almost all of my mana pathways were destroyed and I was also left with serious damage to my mana core!" The healer revealed. Though her tone was void of any emotion, Greg could see it both in the cold look in her eyes and how tightly her fists were clenched just how much the memory of this event affected her.

Greg was careful to show shock at her words as he turned to Olivia. While he may have heard about the damage to her mana pathways and core two days prior when he was frozen by Olivia, he couldn't reveal that he already knew. It'd raise questions that he didn't want to be asked at the moment. "I thought you said damage to the mana core is lethal?" Greg asked, his voice filled with confusion. While the surprise he portrayed was fake, his confusion was real, as such it wasn't that hard to sell. He wasn't sure if what his familiar had said about mana cores being sensitive areas to suffer damage was true or if there was some other detail that he was missing.

"Your familiar is right. Damage to the mana core is almost always lethal," The healer spoke up before Olivia could reply. "Suffering damage to your mana core is like a mundane human being stabbed right through the heart. Someone who survives that isn't the rule, but a rare exception. That I survived is both a function of my countless years of experience as a healer and a prodigious amount of luck," She said. Greg could tell that there was no false humility in her statements. She truly meant it that her prowess as a healer had played a part in her survival but aided by the fact that fortune had chosen to smile at her.

"To no one's surprise, since that day, I've been doing everything I can to try and find a way to heal the damage done to me. Given the damage I suffered, my body was unable to handle the same amount and purity of mana it previously could. Had I tried to force it, I probably would have shattered what remained of my core. In the first year after the betrayal, I didn't even dare try to perform any magic. It's only in the second year when the damage wasn't as fresh and my condition as unstable, that I dared to try tier one magic, and even then, only the simplest and weakest of this tier of spells," There was a bit of silence after she said this and the healer seemed to be reliving the memory in her head.

"Even then, it was too much! I could tell immediately that if I cast anything other than the weakest of cantrips, or tried to maintain my magic for more than five breaths of time, I would destroy what remained of my mana core and pathways. I knew that if ever I was going to survive this ordeal and regain my power as a seventh-rank mage, I'd need to find new ways to make use of magic that wouldn't be as taxing to my core and mana pathways as the current system of magic is. I started by studying how mana affects weaker vessels like small animals and common everyday materials that had no magical properties," She relayed.

"If I may be allowed to be a bit immodest, a high magical affinity isn't the only reason I managed to become a seventh-tier mage. I've always had a mind sharper than most when it came to the field of magic. Even among my peers, few could rival me as far as knowledge and insight into the various fields of magic were concerned. When I am motivated to, there aren't that many subjects in the field of magic that I can't dig into. And trust me, I was more than motivated! I put all my mind and intellect to the question of how to get weaker vessels such as myself to bear more and more mana. Within two years of this, I gained enough insight, not only to be able to use almost any tier-one spell without worsening my condition, but I could also make small magical tools using materials that wouldn't have been able to bear any kind of magic under the present magical paradigm," She revealed.

"Now, ten years later, while I can only cast up to tier three spells, I never stopped studying the effects of mana on items that weren't initially magical in nature. Over the past ten years, I've made a number of discoveries that are key to what we hope to do today and the sigil on the floor. The first and most shocking is the fact that mana pathways weren't a feature unique to mages and magical beasts. Heck, it wasn't just unique to the living. Expose a certain creature or item to mana long enough, and eventually, channels start to form in the creature or item. It's almost as if there are natural pathways through the creature or item which the mana naturally finds easier to course through," She said.

"The second discovery I made is something I came to call the spillover effect. There are several methods out there that mages use to open up their mana core and pathways. The one thing that they all have in common, however, is that once they are formed, they have to reinforce their core and mana pathways as much as possible to keep the mana from spilling out and into their bodies, otherwise it'll wreak havoc within their body. Think of it the same way as you do air. While air is important to your body, if you start getting air bubbles in your bloodstream, you won't be that far from death. In the same way, while your blood is important, if your lungs started to fill up with blood, it wouldn't be cause for celebration, to say the least. In other words, for most mages out there, mana has to stay within the channels they have opened, otherwise, they wouldn't be long for this world. The same, however, was not true in my experiments," She declared.

"When the channels formed naturally they were no longer a closed system like the artificially made mana pathways. A small amount of the mana that I passed through the natural channels was lost. At first, I thought it to be a flaw in the naturally made mana pathways. I thought that they were leaking mana because they weren't as formidable as their artificial counterparts. Months later, after continuous observation, I discovered just how wrong I was. The leaked mana wasn't being lost per se, instead, it was being used to fortify the area around the mana channels. You have seen my table back in the infirmary, have you not?" she posed. Greg nodded. "When I first got it six years ago, it was no different from any other table out there. After six years of passing my mana through it, even if the strongest man back in the town was given an ax, they wouldn't be able to make a scuff on it let alone chop it to pieces.

The reason this is important is because the effect isn't fixed. Whenever I start out on a new experimental subject, I usually can only pass the lowest levels of tier-one mana. The longer I keep at it, however, the higher the amount and tier of magic I can pass through the medium. Do you know what the implications of this are?" She asked. For the first time, the healer's voice lost its dispassionate tone and a bit of excitement seeped into it as she spoke. "Is there a limit to the magic that a subject can handle? And if it can rise without limit, then what happens if you have a ninth-tier mage working with you?" She asked.

Greg's eyes went wide as a figurative bomb exploded in his mind, the implications of the healer's words hitting him like a speeding train. If one could be made to slowly acclimate to the mana of a ninth-tier mage even before they started their journey as a mage, then what heights could they rise to, once they actually started their magical journey? Greg couldn't help but look at the sigil before him with new eyes. His familiar's assessment that this was an idea that could bring about a new era in the magic world wasn't at all an exaggeration. If a ninth-tier mage got their hands on this work, they would be able to pump out other ninth-tier mages like they were cheap candy! This intricate-looking sigil wasn't just some markings on the ground, instead, it was a doorway into a different era in magic!

***

Hope you enjoyed the Chapter. Please support my work if you can. And don't forget to favorite, vote, and comment.